File this map under cartographic calligraphy. This is probably my favorite map yet.

While working at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, I had a colleague write my name in Arabic, I recently scanned her text and created a tile that has two attached signatures. The result is a reflection of my signature that can be read in different directions.

I chose to use this map for the DCCAH’s Young Emerging Artist Grant and printed 3 copies. One was framed and currently hangs in my house and another one was donated to the Library of Congress’ Geography & Mapping Division.

I used the same imagery that I used to make the The Washington National Cathedral Lenz, but instead of placing the imagery into the Lenz template, I just used the 4 plane mandala template. The 4 planes then reflect 2 times giving a total of 8 lines of radial symmetry. What I like the most about this rendering is that I bent the Cathedral! I should have included that in one of the screenshots above because I have a small series of bent buildings that I’ve created in the last year or so. Of course my favorite is the WhiteHouse (“Get Bent Bush!”). I’ll try to put the bent Cathedral on-line shortly.

Nonetheless, I think it looks awesome (as usual), but this rendering I actually over-projected by making the rendering larger than it needed to be. The beauty of the raster projection process is that I can merely scale down the final product in photoshop to correct it. Yet, this has happened time and time again with my most recent mandalas. I need to do the math before rendering them to make sure I don’t have to down sample each rendering. Naw— Go big!

This rendering was made for a very special friend of mine. You can see her apartment building all over this rendering (I believe you can see it about 20 times!) and you can see the Washington National Cathedral 8 times reflected around the center (hence the name).

Although the cathedral is actually an Episcopal church, I think that the layout of the rendering, and more specifically, the way Wisconsin Ave. forms the central ridge, makes the image look very similar to the Irish Cross (below).

This is actually the second rendering because I had to scrap the first one because there was a slight defect and has been deleted. The square within the circle was too large and I had to shrink it to make it look like the rest of the renderings in the “Lenz Project.” Regardless, I look forward to seeing this one hanging on her wall shortly :-)

Nikolas Schiller is a second-class American citizen living in America's last colony, Washington, DC. This blog is my on-line repository of what I have created or found on-line since May of 2004. If you have any questions or comments, please contact:If you would like to use content found here, please consult my Fair Use page.